Story-to-Gameplay Ratio

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"Its not an exaggeration to say that well over half of Metal Gear Solid 4's first hour is spent watching movies. This percentage dips a bit as you get further into the story, but its still a great deal of the experience."

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Does this work? It depends. Games with great gameplay and no story, such as the Super Smash Bros. series, sell fantastically. Games with bad gameplay and no story tend, unsurprisingly, not to last. Games with bad gameplay but a high Story to Gameplay Ratio, especially if the story is considered great, sell to those who are willing to slog through the boring game to get at the crunchy story bits and Cutscenes. Enough of those people exist to make many of these games profitable, though with the exception of a few popular ones, most of these never go anywhere near a bestsellers chart.

Please note: This list is ranked. That means the closer is an item to the top, the more gameplay it has; the closer to the bottom, the more story it has. So, if you know about a really, really plot-heavy game don't place it under "Lowest Story to Gameplay Ratio"; instead, place it right above "Highest Story to Gameplay Ratio".

Many puzzle games such as Tetris have literallyno story. There is not even a Hand Wave explanation as to why differently shaped blocks are falling into Red Square; just play the game.

There is at least one exception: in Tetris Worlds there are cute little robots and their star is about to go supernova, and you have to drop the blocks into the square to power some sort of machine that terraforms other planets in other solar systems so the robots can live on them.

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There are actually several video games that consist of a story shoehorned into Tetris. Another one is Tetris Plus for the original PlayStation where there was a professor "doing archeology" who had to get to the bottom of the block chamber.

Crusader Kings II is driven almost entirely by Random Events (the first game not so much). Charlemagne gets certain preformatted events and certain horde invasions, e.g. the rise Genghis Khan, are scheduled, but overall, even without player intervention, the world will not follow anything resembling its historical course. The game's only goal is to keep your dynasty going.

Europa Universalis, Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun, and Hearts of Iron are somewhat more plot-oriented. Unlike Crusader Kings, you play a nation rather than a series of rulers, and the "National Ideas" mechanics and decision trees tend to push you into particular paths depending where you play (e.g. forming the Swedish Empire or founding and expanding the United States in EU4, conquering Central America as an imperialist Mexico in HoI4).

Vanish has a very minimalist plot. You're thrown into the sewers by unknown people, and you have to find the exit. Also, there are plenty of subterranean monsters in the way. No further explanation is present.

N: Even after being cleverly embellished to sound like a grand quest, the page describing the ninja's basic goal (getting gold, avoiding enemies, and reaching the exit) is quite tiny.

Parodying this, SubTerra has a short story which intentionally has nothing whatsoever to do with the game.

Eversion has this one-line description of a plot hidden away in the readme file: "Princess is kidnapped. You must save princess", but it has pretty much no impact on gameplay.

Virtual-ON has an even lesser ratio than the other typical fighting games. Whatever the Excuse Plot might say, the sole purpose of the game is to entertain the Gundam-maniacs; the mechas, save for Fei-Yen, do not even have a personal story of their own. MARZ met with backlash for trading stripped-down gameplay for intense storyline, however.

Similarly, Virtua Fighter gives no importance to its story at all. Oh, there is the whole thing about the machinations of J6, but they're All There in the Manual; none of that actually makes it into the game. In fact, the only thing in the game that reminds you that J6 even exists is that Goh wears their name on the back of his gi. (Note that Goh didn't debut until the Updated Re-release of the fourth game, which first hit arcades in August 2002—close to nine years after the series first hit the fighting game scene.)

John Carmack of id Software maintains that story is completely incidental to gaming. The original two Dooms and the original Quake embody this philosophy, with stories no more complex than "you're here, bad guys are over there; kill them." Quake II is only a little bit more complex, and Quake III eliminates even the slightest hint of a story. Doom 3, however, is considerably more plot driven, as is Raven's Quake IV.

Roguelike genre is characterized by fairly thin plots. NetHack, Dungeon Crawl, Angband and most of its variants as well as the genre-defining Rogue feature plots no more complex than "retrieve MacGuffin" or "slay the Big Bad". Some Roguelikes have more plot — for example, Ancient Domains of Mystery has a neat backstory and a more defined fantasy world than most Roguelikes, but remains ultimately driven by gameplay, not plot. Of course, for a genre that typically features Permadeath, having lots of plot to replay each time could get a bit annoying.

Fighting games in general do have a story, but you wouldn't know it from the actual games. Most of it is All There in the Manual in many cases, and the examples that actually do avert this (or at least try to explain the reason behind all the fighting in-game) tend to be ignored.

The Touhou fighting games belong with the rest of the franchise below; in one-player Story Mode there's the same amount of in-game dialogue, with the same degree of (loose) relevance to the plot.

The Flash fighting game Death Vegas is on the other end of the scale. Not only are there extensive cutscenes setting up each fight and placing it, but every single character's fights, and their outcomes, are a canonical part of the overarching story.

Strange to think of it, but long-running console RPGs like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy used to belong on this end of the scale. You had some exposition from a quest-giver to tell you what your newest goal is, some NPCs to hand out clues and advice, and the other 99% of the game was you exploring the world and thrashing monsters. The "story" was just a series of obstacles and objectives that ensured you gradually progressed from the easy areas to the hard ones. Etrian Odyssey is a modern throwback to this style of game.

The SHIP storyline is also a really good indication of how RPGs used to be versus how they are now. Playing the game blindly, there's nothing to indicate that the player needs a SHIP, and nothing that points to getting one in this town. If this scenario popped up nowadays the heroes would have a long unskippable discussion about how they desperately need a ship, run a few fetch quests in town before overhearing someone talking about the PIRATEs, then come up with an elaborate scheme (probably involving a stealth minigame) to sneak aboard and take control of it somehow. Personally I prefered the old way: roll into town, beat up some chumps, sail away laughing. Also note: now that I have the SHIP I'm still not told what to do with it. It's "You have a SHIP now! Yay! Explore!" and not "You have your SHIP, now you can sail to the place you knew you needed to go!" Just feels like more of an adventure, you know?

Like the Final Fantasy series, Ultima and its prequel ''Akalabeth' began on this end of the spectrum. As both gameplay and story depth evolved, later Ultimas shifted toward the middle.

Basically, any video game that tries to be nothing more than a game (not that thats a bad thing). There may be an intro, and an ending, with dialog, and maybe some brief cutscenes in-between.

Super Mario 64 is a perfect example of this. A voiced intro, a voiced ending, and nothing else except the occasional snippet of dialog from an NPC.

Nintendo in generally makes many games of that kind even today. If there is any real depth to the story, chances are that those parts are completely optional, like the Metroid Prime scans.

Wario Land: Shake It! has this, to probably the most minimal point ever. You've got an intro scene, an ending movie... and after watching them just once, you never get forced to see them again (going straight in an optional bonus menu). Same for the credits.

Though the sequels have more developed plots, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is one of the most extreme example of this side of the scale. Apart from a short hint that appear when you load or start a new game, and a dialogue-less ending, it has no discernible plot whatsoever.

Castlevania generally tends toward a greater gameplay ratio; if there is any plot relevant to the game, it is usually limited to the in-game dialogue or short cutscenes. Even as Castlevania: Lords of Shadow provides probably the most in-depth storyline in the franchise history, it still has a large enough gameplay element to maintain a healthy balance against the plot element.

Tomb Raider has a plot, but it's very minimal by having cut scenes only happening at the end of each "chapter" and said cut scenes are mostly just the plot explained in a simple form. The majority of the game is focused on the gameplay itself. The second game slid further down the ratio by having even less cutscenes than the first game, but the third game onward moved the scale in the opposite direction by having a cutscene for almost every level's end.

Cult ClassicAnother World contains no dialogue (with the exception of an introductory sequence in the SNES version) and no cutscenes; however, the game is rich with narrative, all expressed through its (linear) gameplay and setpieces. Its minimalism influenced many future games.

The first two Merlin's Revenge games had a moderately long cutscene at the beginning and end of each game, with the story having no impact on gameplay. This was changed a bit with the third game, which added a few very short, skippable cutscenes in the middle of the game, most notably the scene with the stone inscription.

The Japanese Sega Dreamcast version of Ikaruga is basically five stages of outright blasting and combo action with a few lines of story at the start of each stage. The most story-heavy section of the game is the last stage, where there are a few lines preceding each of the boss's four phases, and there's some "dialogue" right at the very end... And that's about it. Control is taken away from the player twice per stage; Once at the end of the intro section, again when the boss appears, (except in the last stage, since the boss appears immediately after the intro section) and at the "stage clear" screen. Any other time, the player is free to move and shoot however they like.

In the English Nintendo GameCube port, even this little amount of story is ripped away; The only story to be had is in the manual, and in the very final cutscene.

The Touhou series features dialogue just before each boss fight... and that's about it, unless you have the Japanese manual. And much of that dialogue doesn't have anything to do with the main plot until the last 2 or 3 stages. This gives its vibrant fanbase plenty of room to come up with all sorts of fanon.

Meteos has an opening cutscene and an ending based on which mode you play, and nothing else. This doesn't stop what little amount of story that shows up there from being amusing. It also has brief descriptions of each world, typical of games that like to have a bit of story without getting in the way of the action.

The Star Fox series typically has a 1-2 minute long cutscene at the beginning and end of each stage. Most of the plot comes from in-game transmissions that take place during gameplay.

Team Fortress 2 had literally no story when it was first released. The "Meet the [Class]" movies give the characters some additional dimensions, and it's implied in a couple of places that RED (Reliable Excavation Demolition) is a demolition company and BLU (Builders League United) is a construction company, but that's about it.

This page adds a bit more background to the teams, but essentially the story boils down to "two companies that control the world have hired mercenaries to kill each other. Go help them."

Now, it has much more story with this comic and this page, the latter which describes how the whole mess started.

The plot still pretty much remains in the background, however, and when a plot point actually does appear in-game, it usually just takes the form of a taunt or response line.

Left 4 Dead. There are small cutscenes at the beginning of each campaign that last under a minute. There is dialogue throughout the levels, but they take place during the actual gameplay. Not to mention there is writing on the walls which is optional for the players to look at.

Nothing Is Scarier in effect. With this game and its sequel, much of the cause and backstory of the ensuing Zombie Apocalypse are only in the footnotes. The characters only meet at the start of the game (or at least a week earlier in the case of the first game), meaning that not all of them are exactly open to sharing their personalities and getting attached, as you never know who's going to turn next.

Drops closer to the story-heavy end with the release of The Sacrifice and the accompanying comic.

Considering the reputation the series acquired for its frequent use of Quick Time Events and taking control away from the player, it may be surprising for new players to hear the first two installments of Call of Duty were actually very light on plot. Past the short Justified Tutorial and skipabble narrations at the beginning of each campaigns to set the historical context of the missions, levels have very little downtime and typically have the player shooting or being shot at within the first 30 seconds.

A staple of the series has been interrupting gameplay with unskippable cutscenes and quick time events to further develop the game's story. Some of the games in the series have more character development and story than others, on top of the unskippable cutscenes.

Gears of War had quite a few cutscenes, but they were never very long, and there wasn't much story behind them. The sequel had a more in-depth storyline, but the cutscenes were still not very long, with most of the plot being told in in-game transmissions.

Portal tells most of the story through the passive-aggressive ravings of an AI and the implications of the environment. Most of the game is about performing physics-warping puzzles and getting from place to place — and yet the game's writing was one of its biggest selling points, being pitch-dark and very, very funny.

Portal 2, while keeping the physics-warping puzzles from the first game, expands beyond the test chambers and has quite a bit more story, mostly through the dialogue of the AIs and recorded messages you hear throughout. The co-op campaign, however, is really just many more puzzles that GLaDOS wants you and a friend to complete.

The early, 8-bit Ninja Gaiden games (not to be confused with the current ones). The original Ninja Gaiden was one of the very first games to have many well-done cutscenes with a genuinely interesting story filled with twists and turns. The fact that it was backed up by some great (if impossible) gameplay helped a lot as well. One of the first games which caused players to beat each level to see what happens next in the story.

Incidentally, the writer for these games would later go on to work on a number of beloved Squaresoft RPGs, specifically theChronoseries and Xenogears. He did not, however, return for...

The 3D Ninja Gaiden games, which seem to have taken the opposite approach to their predecessors; the story is incomprehensible, uninspired and entirely uninteresting, but strictly relegated to cutscenes that are short, flashy and far-between. The main incentive for the players to keep going is simply to challenge themselves. It works for what it is, but it's ironic and somewhat sad that the reboot of a series that helped pioneer the concept of story in action games would completely abandon such a defining feature of its predecessors.

Myst and most of its sequels/imitators. There is a story, but it definitely takes a back seat to wandering around beautiful, lonely worlds solving fiendish puzzles. (Individual sequels waver a bit — Myst gives you almost nothing to start with, and each subsequent game adds a little more story and a little less puzzles.)

The split between Myst and its sequels is because of the story. In Myst, all of the story is backstory and you only really learn it at the very end. The only storyline in the game itself is "go fetch" and there's only one decision in the game that's story driven, so the puzzles and the pretty pictures are all gameplay. In all of the sequels, you're an active part of the ongoing story and the puzzles are part of (or drive) the storyline, so they belong much farther down this list.

Vietcong. The briefing and debriefing cutscenes are rather long, but the rest of the game is mostly a standard jungle FPS.

No More Heroes has several-minute-long cutscenes before and after boss fights, but most of the game is spent doing odd assassination jobs around the city, exploring the city, fighting through the levels, etc.

Its creator'sprevious game, on the other hand, was notorious for having well-directed, stylish cutscenes (and a lot of them) and an extremely complex and ambitious story... juxtaposed with highly linear and questionably interesting gameplay.

And by contrast, No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle has (mostly) shorter cutscenes and more gameplay than ever, which has earned it greater praise from critics but mixed responses from fans.

Half-Life has a low to moderate ratio: there is story and dialog, yes, but you never lose control of Gordon Freeman during any dialog or event. On the other hand, because you often can't move Gordon to the next area until the dialog is completed (which is usually when the person talking unlocks the door or whatever is in your way), these scenes can arguably be thought of as semi-interactive unskippable cutscenes.

The Silent Hill series. The cutscenes don't go on for too long, and are spaced out reasonably. Yet a lot of story is contained within those scenes.

Dwarf Fortress is an odd, hard-to-place example. The world you play on has an extremely rich and detailed backstory that's completely procedurally generated, but in Fortress Mode they're largely irrelevant, unless you find yourself with a situation where you're the last surviving settlement of a Vestigial Empire that everyone else is at war with.

The Panzer Dragoon series is a shooter series with a vast amount of backstory, but most of it is optional, aside from 2-minute cutscenes at the beginning of each stage.

Halo sits much higher on the list than one would expect with its rather frenetic violence and combat. This is mostly because in addition to a lot of cutscenes, the games makes a point of having plenty of exposition and dialogue taking place during the levels. Additionally, all the games from Halo 3 onward have terminals, data pads, and audio logs scattered throughout the levels which give lots of additional information on the background lore, with several actually being complete stories in their own right.

Marathon, Bungie's first FPS series, is also high on the list due to story and worldbuilding delivered through the terminals, during the time when the plot of FPS games amounted to "kill monsters." The series's story writer Greg Kirkpatrick, responded to complaints about Marathon's "confusing and unnecessary story" with an answer that is an opposite of John Carmack's own view on this near the top of this list: "Read my lips: Computer games tell stories. That's what they're for."

Mass Effect sits a bit lower down than some would expect, as a lot of its dialogue is skippable. However, it is quite hefty on the talking side of things, but still has plenty of action. Well, not to mention that the dialogue is playable, so it's really not not gameplay.

Hell, pick a BioWare game. Any BioWare game. For good or ill, they put a lot of their efforts on characters. For every half-hour spent on dungeon-crawls and slaying monsters, expect an hour and a half of helping your colorful crew through their Character Arcs.

Uncharted is quite high on story, AND gameplay. This is part of its appeal.

The Trauma Center series has long dialog scenes before and after operations, but after you've beaten the operation once, you can skip right past them.

Rule of Rose had a really intriguing, complex, and fleshed-out storyline, but mediocre at best gameplay. Almost everyone who played it and enjoyed it did so solely for the story; unfortunately, since it sat closer to the gameplay end of the scale, many reviewers gave the game bad scores because they felt that the gameplay took away from your ability to enjoy the story.

On its surface, Thomas Was Alone doesn't look like much more than a puzzle/platformer where you move blocks with differing abilities around. The real charm in this game is the surprisingly deep story about an artificial intelligence named Thomas awakening and becoming self-aware enough to develop lasting friendships with other A.I.s.

The majority of Shin Megami Tensei games are usually very plot-driven (even the NES games have surprisingly high content in story), but they rely on the player grinding through several hours of dungeons to progress. In fact, they average out at the approximate center, but they rely on gameplay more than story. Exceptions to this are the Devil Survivor games, which are actually higher in story than gameplay.

The Witcher games, being based on a literature novel series and featuring adaptation that's true to its source material and many, many story driven quests — but as the game goes on, the exploration becomes wider to the point that the third game features a Wide Open Sandbox with many things to do and lots of story and interaction driven quests.

Kingdom Hearts II deserves a mention here, even by the standards of the series. Entering a new room? Cutscene! Wait, it's just a corridor. Regain control of your character long enough to walk down it for three seconds. Next room: Cutscene! Goofy says something, monsters appear, regain control to fight them, battle ends, Cutscene! "That sure was a tough battle, Sora..." and so on. (Ironically, KHII allowed players to skip cutscenes much like in Chain of Memories, likely in response to how long certain cutscenes in the original could run—doubly so if they preceded particularly hellish boss fights.) The prequel prequel Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep has a similar situation.

Dating Sims are rather similar to Visual Novels as far as gameplay goes, differing in that they give you a greater variety of choices and actually allow your mistakes to play out instead of slapping you with a bad ending immediately.

BlazBlue has a very large, very complex plot, especially for a fighting game. A character's story usually consists of about six or seven short matches and up to an hour of text.

Chronophantasma veers even heavier towards the story side. Gameplay in the story mode has been reduced to single-round combat, and many times, the fight will end when the enemy A.I. has barely loss half of their health.

The Ace Attorney series is essentially a story that you help move forward by doing the right pre-determined things. It's slightly more interactive than a traditional Visual Novel, but not much more.

Meta example: classic 1982 ZX Spectrum text adventure The Hobbit. Gameplay was heavily reliant on the story for direction and atmosphere, it's just that said story had been published 45 years previously.

Cave Story is interesting on that regard. While there is a who, where, when, why and how, and a very charismatic set of characters to carry those nicely, it's not given to the player at all until they're at least out of the Noob Cave. And even then the plot trickles slowly, yet increasingly. The semblance of a serious storyline only comes to light by the third stage, for example.

World of Warcraft is a little odd in this regard. There's lots of story in terms of dialog from NPCs and other characters, but all of it can be (and often is by most players) ignored by those who just want to jump into the quests.

The Warcraft universe in general has really good story-lines but it is safe to say that the game's immense popularity is not because of its plot. The game would likely still be as popular as it is even if it had virtually no story. The same can be said about Diablo.

Starcraft is in an odd place in that has two distinct fanbases, one that loves the story and lore and one that skips this altogether and just plays multiplayer. The last few entries actually had different game mechanics for single and multiplayer.

Quite a lot of modern Interactive Fiction puts the emphasis on "fiction" to the point where puzzles (the most gamelike elements of the genre) are completely dispensed with in favor of narrative exploration. Photopia is the preeminent example. A Mind Forever Voyaging pioneered this approach in the 1980s.

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey: The first and last few chapters in particular consist almost exclusively of steering your character around from one cutscene to another.

Tales Series games have their praise and fanbase in each game's storylines. Character backgrounds are diverse and very detailed, mostly explained through cutscenes and sometimes into the side-conversations between characters known as "skits". For most games, the Lore of the worlds may even be explained in these cutscenes and skits as well.

Fahrenheit, also known as Indigo Prophecy in the USA, has been defined as an "interactive movie" by its creators. Its gameplay and story very much overlap and complement each other. Despite being almost entirely focused on its plot, the story is surprisingly flexible and control is only very rarely taken away from the player due to the almost entirely contextual control scheme.

MOTHER 3 has a great story especially when you get to thinking about it. Its gameplay is still challenging and/or enjoyable, but the story is the reason why half of its pages even exist. It's the darkest of the MOTHER series but still keeps the quirky charm of its predecessors, if that's even possible.

The selling point of the 'Kiseki Series'' is its detailed and very rich World Building and character-driven plots. How detailed? The first trilogy alone is larger than the Mass Effect trilogy combined. There's a staggering amount of text in every game, dialogue scenes are frequent and just as frequently go on for a good twenty minutes. While there's typically a lot of sidequests to do and dungeons to crawl, it's typically a breather for an hour before you dive back into the plot. Even then, every NPC has a name, personality, and backstory, and they'll be happy to explain why they need your help. Scripts never fall below 300000 words in length, and can easily go way above that. It's also fond of making duologies and trilogies of one interconnected plot, just getting through these is the equivalent of several novels. What's more, unlike most Eastern RPG developers, every game takes place in the same time and place with crossover plotlines.

Xeno series:

The Xenosaga series, which is essentially several movies with occasional interactive parts. Just to show how bad it was in the first game, in the first few hours, playtime was only about a fifth of the cutscene time. And the scene when you first get on to the ship you're going to be going around in for the rest of the game, is thirty minutes long, and they even let you save mid-scene. The second game was slightly better, but not by much.

Xenogears is similar, being essentially a part of the same series. Not only does the game interface come off as somewhat hastily assembled (and it probably was), but the game's story is extremely involved. Disc 2, which the dev team didn't even have time to finish, is essentially one huge cutscene interrupted by a couple dungeons. You finally get access to the world map just before the final dungeon, for the sake of sidequests. Most egregiously, towards the very end of the first disc there's a cutscene that's about an hour long.

And in a twist of irony, Xeno-creator Tetsuya Takahashi specifically described Xenoblade (no relation to previousXeno-titles) as being on the exact opposite end of the scale from his (in)famous previous works, calling the pursuit of excessive story-to-gameplay ratio "a dead end". In fact, Xenoblade has long cutscenes and a complex plot... but it's set in one heck of aWide Open Sandbox. Basically, they made the gameplay big enough to contain the story. That Takahashi is now working with Nintendo (see above) may or may not have anything to do with this new direction.

Notably, while it tends to overshadow the previous games due to its sheer amount of cutscenes, Metal Gear Solid 4 actually has a much lower and more balanced Story-to-Gameplay Ratio compared to the earlier games in the series due to having longer gameplay sequences. For a counter-example, check out Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, which has about one hour of gameplay for every two hours of cutscenes.

Final Fantasy X thus far has the highest ratio of its series; the hero goes along a linear path from one scene to the next, with occasional boss fights in between. It's only when you're ready to face the Big Bad that you finally have the freedom to travel about at your leisure, which, like Xenogears below, is pretty much for sidequests, bonus bosses, and extra scenes.

Final Fantasy XIII rivals the tenth entry for cutscene ratio; it's even been called an interactive 50-hour film.

Heavy Rain is especially notable for this; not only is it worse than its predecessor for being more movie and "Quick Time Events" than game, it was even marketed as an "interactive storytelling experience." note (i.e. a Visual Novel with choices dressed up as a movie)

Beyond Two Souls is much closer to Asura's Wrath in the sense that it made Heavy Rain an interactive (sometimes action) Drama. It is more accurate to call it a "five-six hour movie with some interaction" than a video game as well. According to the commentary, they even minimized the interface from Heavy Rain and made it almost without a UI in the game proper.

Unlike most CCG mobile games, most of which feature some kind of gameplay (most being Rhythm Games), Ensemble Stars! relies on almost 0 skill - players form teams of cards but points are gained simply by tapping the screen. Only the RNG-conjured Encore system resembles any kind of traditional gameplay, and that represents only a fraction of playing time. Naturally, without gameplay to attract players, the story is a much bigger focus than for other mobile games — when it started, it was the first to feature such complex character interactions and backstories or such heavy drama.

Video Example(s):

Sly Cooper

The places where Sly can interact with the environment are illuminated with blue sparkles. Here is is established to be visible to the characters, Bentley claiming that master raccoon thieves like Sly can sense "thieving opportunities", manifesting as "unexplainable blue auras."

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Sly Cooper

The places where Sly can interact with the environment are illuminated with blue sparkles. Here is is established to be visible to the characters, Bentley claiming that master raccoon thieves like Sly can sense "thieving opportunities", manifesting as "unexplainable blue auras."